Reinventing Project Based Learning

Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age

Suzie Boss, Jane Krauss

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781564847195
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

This updated edition of the bestselling Reinventing Project-Based Learning offers examples of the latest tools, assessment strategies and promising practices poised to shape education in the future. This popular ISTE title follows the arc of a project, providing guided opportunities to direct and reflect educators' own learning and professional development. This book shows how to design authentic projects that make the most of available and emerging technologies.This new edition:

• Provides examples of how to merge personalized learning, flipped classrooms, and PBL for effective teaching and learning.
• Includes coverage of computational thinking and coding, demonstrating ways to develop new approaches to solving problems as well as new forms of expression.
• Discusses PBL as an equity consideration, with opportunities for personalization and empowerment, addressing issues of social justice and closing the achievement gap.
• Includes coverage on new trends like augmented and virtual reality; and new and updated Spotlights from educators featured in the first edition and others.
• Features deeper focus on Gold Standard and High Quality PBL, the P21 Framework, and ISTE Standards for Students and Educators.

With this book, teachers will come to appreciate the importance of problem-finding and problem-posing — thoughtful activity that needs to precede problem solving in any context.The companion jump start guide based on this book is Project-Based Learning: Strategies and Tools for Creating Authentic Experiences. Audience: K-12 classroom teachers, teacher educators

Section II

Packing Up

As you begin planning a pilot project, Section II helps you define the conceptual framework and guides you through the design process. Before you introduce the project to your students, invest time to consider the project management skills, strategies, and technologies that will lead you and your students to success.

Chapter 3

Imagining the Possibilities

THIS CHAPTER WILL GUIDE YOU TO:

• Connect the “big ideas” of your curriculum to project opportunities
• Consider how you will help students develop digital-age literacies and become computational thinkers (even if you do not have a technical background yourself)
• Anticipate the six essential learning functions that unfold across the arc of a project and consider technology tools to support them

How do you prepare for a trip? As you pack, you probably imagine the destination and your means of traveling there. You think about the conditions you expect to find. Before “packing up” for your project with concrete planning, picture your destination—the learning ahead—and consider different ways of getting there with your students. With a clear mental image, you will be ready to decide just what you need to take along.

This chapter focuses on establishing the conceptual framework of a project. You may want to align projects with state or local standards, ISTE Standards for Students, content standards such as the Next Generation Science Standards, or other learning goals. At the end of Chapter 3, you will follow a set of prompts that help you identify the central concepts your project will address. This will focus your thinking as you move into project planning, described in Chapter 4, and assessment planning, which we discuss in detail in Chapter 5.

What Is Most Important?

Good projects get to the heart of a discipline. The more complex and important an idea, the better suited it is for the project treatment. Identifying the big ideas—the core concepts and processes—at the heart of the subjects we teach is the first step of project planning.

Think for a moment. What big ideas, what core concepts and processes, should students know after studying with you? If your students understood or could do just two or three things, what would those be? In Earth science, for example, a core concept is energy in the Earth system. Important processes include designing an investigation and using instruments as scientists do. An algebra teacher might say applying linear equations is important. An elementary teacher wants students to increase their reading and writing fluency as they develop literacy skills across subject areas. A history teacher expects students to appreciate how history shapes culture and to understand the investigative techniques of historians.

When you teach from published curriculum, judgments about what is important have been made for you. This can be an efficient system, but students may learn no more than what the textbook publisher imagined for them. The results tend to be predictable and are often generic. Published curriculum and content standards dive straightaway into a sequence of learning objectives. In textbooks, the material is broken into digestible bits. Content may be outdated. Synthesis for understanding important, overarching “big ideas” is left to the masterful teacher and insightful learner.

Projects, on the other hand, are highly contextual. They are created through a series of decisions. Even when projects start with student suggestions, they are designed as complete learning experiences by teachers, the people who best understand curricular goals and students’ needs. Good projects connect directly to students’ frames of reference, interests, and experiences. Teachers who use the project approach might also use textbooks. But instead of being the foundation of a course, the textbook becomes a reference book rich with illustrations and supplying information written at the reading and conceptual level of students.

What’s the “Big Idea”?

Thinking about the “big ideas” of your curriculum is a good workout. Scan the tables of contents of your teaching guides. Review the curriculum standards for your subjects. Look at the ISTE Standards, which help us imagine students as Empowered Learners, Knowledge Constructors, Digital Citizens, and more.

Ask yourself and ask your colleagues: What do these add up to?

Kathy Cassidy (@kathycassidy), an early elementary teacher from Saskatchewan, Canada, wanted her second-grade students to get the “big idea” of what the number 1,000 means. How could she make this number more concrete for her young learners? “We don’t have a lot of space in the classroom to collect things, so I thought of collecting names on a wiki,” she explains. The result was a simple wiki page called, appropriately, 1,000 Names. She started by showing students how to use the edit feature to add their own names—one to a box on the page. Then, she invited parents to join the project, too. Next, she invited three more classrooms at her school to add their names to the page. As word spread online, she says, “It exploded from there.” Grandparents, friends, and others joined in from several countries. Once every week, Cassidy would show her students the wiki (using her projector), which allowed her repeat opportunities to reinforce the meaning of 1,000. They watched as the number of names grew—starting with fewer than 100 and reaching more than 850 within three months. As the number of names approached the goal of 1,000, student interest swelled, too.

Across content areas, updated standards call on students to be able to analyze and apply information, not merely recall facts. This shift reflects the preparation that students need as they head into college, careers, and active citizenship. Review your choice of documents, such as the Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, or the C3 Framework for Social Studies, and you will find language that practically shouts “PBL opportunity.” Consider just a few examples:

• The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) emphasize cross-cutting concepts such as cause and effect, setting the stage for interdisciplinary projects. Throughout the NGSS, active verbs call for students to ask questions, develop models, design and test solutions, and communicate scientific information.
• The C3 Framework for Social Studies outlines an inquiry arc for pursuing knowledge by questioning, applying disciplinary concepts and tools, evaluating sources, communicating conclusions, and taking action.
• The Common Core State Standards emphasize critical thinking, communication, and collaboration, along with the application of content to solve real-life problems.

Technology Focus
Create a Wiki

A wiki is a simple-to-manage website that allows users to add and edit content collectively and online, from any computer with an internet connection. A wiki is useful for planning and managing a project, whether you work alone or collaborate locally or at a distance.

The ease of use and accessibility of a wiki makes it a helpful tool for organizing your thinking and tracking your actions. See Chapter 6 for more about wikis.

This is a good time to set up your own project wiki. Consider building it using PBWorks (pbworks.com/education), which offers free accounts and resources for educators, or try your hand with user-friendly Google Sites (sites.google.com). You can easily embed multimedia and integrate online documents, spreadsheets, and forms into your wiki.

(Although your project wiki may look bare bones at first, don’t worry—it will expand with rich content as you continue with project planning in the coming chapters.)

Every grade level and subject area focuses on big ideas, and so do disciplines in the world outside school. After you identify the overarching concepts and processes you want your students to understand, reflect on why these concepts are important. This will get you thinking about their application or relevance in real life and help you imagine engaging and realistic ways students might grapple with the topics. It will help you to reveal the interdisciplinary aspects of the topic, too.

Think: Who cares about this? Who does it touch? Who interacts with this topic in their work or daily life?

Robert Griffin, who teaches in the fishing community of Grand Manan Island in Canada, uses authentic projects as often as he can. “For an everyday assignment such as letter writing, I have my students relate to an authentic purpose by writing a letter to the Minister of Fisheries on a license issue or a quota issue. These are issues my students would often hear discussed at the supper table,” he explains. For another project on writing, Griffin has students write articles for the local newspaper. His main criterion for determining whether projects are authentic is “whether the activities take place in the real world. For example, do journalists submit articles to the newspaper to be published? Yes, and therefore so do my students.” If the editor of the county newspaper chooses to publish an article, he says, “the student receives a stipend from the newspaper as well as a grade from me for their course. Seeing their articles in the newspaper is authentic assessment. The publication of the article says that their article was good enough to be published.”

Think again about the big Earth science idea: energy in the Earth system. Who outside of school pays attention to this fundamental idea? In Earth science, a seismologist may pay attention to energy as it relates to plate tectonics and tsunamis. People who live along shorelines care about tsunamis, too. So do community zoning boards, emergency response agencies, insurance companies, and the fishing and hospitality industries. Imagine how a hands-on, minds-on project might evolve to take diverse interests such as these into account.

Thinking about real-world contexts helps to reveal the interdisciplinary nature of a project. Unlike traditional learning, in which ideas are sorted into “pure” disciplines, project-based learning, like real life, gets messy and overlaps multiple disciplines. It is in this overlapping space that great projects are born.

In physical science, learning about energy might be an end in itself. But imagine introducing students to energy in the context of designing simple but efficient stoves that burn biomass (such as agricultural waste) for fuel, instead of wood or charcoal. Now imagine incorporating environmental science as students learn about the harmful effects of burning wood or charcoal for fuel. Get students thinking about where in the world people still rely on wood for cooking, despite health risks associated with breathing in smoke, and you have integrated geography. Take it a step further with technology, and now students are hosting a videoconference to share their stove designs ...